Texas True Crime Miscellany

I

EARLY TIMES, EARLY CRIMES

JAMES BROCK’S HONESTY OF PURPOSE

A cowboy named Frank Woosley was heading back to ranch headquarters in May 1877 after a hard day of rounding up cattle in the rough country of Shackelford County, Texas, near the town of Fort Griffin, when a depressed feeling came over him. He decided to lie down under the nearest tree to see if the feeling would pass.

Next thing he knew, it was a year later and he was in the wilds of Arkansas. He had a vague recollection of being in Jewett, Texas, for a short spell, but other than that—nothing. Frank Woosley stuck to that story for fourteen years, or maybe he made it up on the spot when the man who had allegedly murdered him in Texas called out his name and pointed a Colt revolver at him.

The man with the gun, his wrongly accused but now potentially actual killer, was a former Shackelford County rancher name James A. Brock. He didn’t just happen to run into Woosley; he had been looking for him more or less continually for all of those fourteen years. Woosley had vanished so suddenly that his family back in Ohio and a majority of the people in Shackelford County thought he’d been murdered. They believed Brock did it. A living, breathing (or even recently deceased) Frank Woosley would be evidence to the contrary. Now, at long last, Brock had that evidence.

Like Frank and his brother Ed, who also played a key role in the proceedings, Brock was from Ohio; he and the Woosley brothers were cousins. Brock migrated from Madison County, Ohio, in 1870, when he was twenty-five and bought a ranch on Foyle Creek. The Woosley brothers joined him a couple of years later. The three kinsmen never really got along.

A typical Fort Griffin cowboy of the 1870s. James A. Brock wasn’t a typical Fort Griffin cowboy. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Brock didn’t get along with a lot of people in Shackelford County. Sallie Reynolds Matthews, who grew up on the outer limit of the northwest edge of the Texas frontier and married rancher John Matthews in 1876, wrote of Brock: He was a strange sort of person, extremely reticent and not at all friendly, the kind of person who was out of place on the western frontier and because of his peculiar nature, he was shunned by most of the people. Historian Ty Cashion noted that locals also considered his stovepipe hat and clothes out of place on the frontier.

Soon after his brother disappeared, Ed Woosley claimed that Brock had enlisted his longtime ranch hand, an African American named Uncle Nick Williams, to kill Frank. Ed and a group of vigilantes took Williams into their custody and promised him immunity in exchange for his testimony against Brock. He refused. You cannot force me to tell a lie, he told the men, and that was the truth. The vigilantes tied a rope around his neck and strung him up to hang—three times—but he never relented. They finally let him go.

Not accustomed to waiting around for trials, and usually having their own way in Shackelford County, a particularly nasty and prolific group of local vigilantes decided to lynch Brock anyway. The Texas Rangers, called in to quell the region’s rising tide of vigilantism, were on hand to make sure Brock had his day in court.

At his trial, Brock insisted, as he had from the beginning, that not only did he not kill Woosley, neither had anyone else. Woosley was alive, he claimed, and his disappearance was a circumstantial frame job by the Woosleys to lay hands on Brock’s land and money. Frontier journalist Don Hampton Biggers noted that Brock and the Woosleys’ peculiar business arrangement stipulated that if Brock died from any cause, natural or otherwise, the Woosleys would get all the property.

To eleven of the jurors, Brock’s story sounded like a wild conspiracy theory cooked up by a desperate man; they voted to hang him. The twelfth juror begged to differ, pointing out the glaring absence of a body as an absence of proof. The judge dismissed the charge and released Brock, but people in Fort Griffin and Ohio believed Brock got away with murder. As for the ranchers, they never much liked him anyway.

Some of Brock’s fellow stockmen soon accused him of sequestration, a fancy word for cattle theft. Three such cases dragged on for three years at a time when the cattle business in Shackelford County was flourishing. But Brock spent most of that time and a good deal of his money battling the accusations. The courts found him not guilty on all charges.

Soon after Ed Woosley died of natural causes in 1880, Brock sold his ranch and left town to look for the man who stole his reputation, spending all his money and working at any job he could find to finance the quest. He settled in El Paso in 1884 and began selling real estate, but he never stayed so busy he couldn’t leave town at a moment’s notice to investigate the latest alleged sighting of Frank Woosley.

Those who said Brock was obsessed—and many people did—were not exaggerating. He flooded the country with pictures of the alleged murder victim, offered $1,000 for information leading to Frank Woosley’s discovery, dead or alive, and followed leads, tips and alleged sighting to towns and outposts across the country. None of them panned out.

In June 1891, a detective named G.B. Wells wrote a telegram to Brock saying he had spotted Woosley in Arkansas. As he had done so many times before, Brock hurried to check out the latest tip only to find that, once again, he had trailed the wrong man. Another dead end.

Brock, Wells and the local sheriff had dinner in Searcy, Arkansas, before boarding a train to Memphis, never suspecting that Frank Woosley was riding the same train. At Augusta, Arkansas, Brock decided to surrender his six-shooter to the railway agent rather than take it to town, where carrying a firearm was illegal. He approached the agent and was about to unbuckle his gun belt when he glanced out the window and saw Frank Woosley, live and in person, standing next to the platform. His heart started beating real fast. He held on to his gun.

Frank Woosley! he called out.

Woosley surely had another round of depressed feelings when he found himself staring down the barrel of his alleged killer’s pistol. Wells and the sheriff approached Woosley from either side as Brock aimed his gun at Woosley.

Our recognition was mutual, Brock said. I told him he could either go with me and clear up the murder charge or die instantly.

Woosley decided to visit the family.

Back home in Ohio, Woosley stuck to his story of how he suffered a powerful bout of amnesia after he got that depressed feeling out on the range so many years ago. He said he worked at a small pottery shop in Benton, Arkansas, for several years, took over the business when the owner died and married his former boss’s widow. He and his new wife were still operating the shop when Brock took Frank home to get reacquainted with the Woosley family. Brock, showered with congratulations from the people of his hometown, was overcome with emotion and cried like a child.

A story in the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the whole affair started after Frank Woosley’s mother cut off his allowance. According to the paper, Woosley was well aware of the search for him. He even subscribed to the New London Enterprise, published in London, Ohio, twenty-five miles east of his old home, but he did not get in touch with his family until Brock took him home at gunpoint. Brock’s good name followed him back to El Paso, where he lived until his death on April 1, 1913, his sixty-eighth birthday.

The following day, the El Paso Times described him as a happy but broken man—broken in spirit, in physical endurance and mentality.…He never defrauded any man and there was a simple honesty of purpose in his every act that endeared him to those who knew him best.…There was not a vicious trait in his character.

And let’s give a shout out to Uncle Nick Williams, who risked the noose in defense of honesty, and the lone juror who refused to convict Brock for murder. Their honor, courage and values were all that kept Brock from hanging for a crime no one committed. They, too, had a simple honesty of purpose.

SIX DEGREES OF MURDER

We don’t know as much about Jerome Theodore J.T. Vaughan as we probably should. By all accounts he was a decent man who lived an honest life. A dispatch from Meridian to the Galveston Daily News described him as one of the best citizens of this county, engaged in merchandising on Hog Creek, near the McLennan and Bosque County lines.

The tribute was in response to Vaughan’s murder at his little store on the night of May 28, 1878. Accounts vary as to whether Vaughan was sleeping in the store at the time or whether his killers called him from his residence under the pretense of buying tobacco, but both stories have the same ending. He was found the next day, his face, white and ghastly, upturned to the morning sun.

Several neighbors rushed to Vaughan’s assistance when they heard gunfire and reached the store just in time to see the killers vanish into the night. The neighbors fired ten or twelve shots at the riders to no effect. Nobody recognized the men, or if they did, they kept it to themselves.

Vaughan was rumored to have a fair amount of money, which he kept in a safe inside his store because the nearest bank was forty miles away in Waco. That rumor no doubt got him killed. One version claims the killers got away with $2,500, or about $50,000 of today’s dollars, including $400 in gold pieces. Other reports suggest a much more modest haul, but either way the motive was robbery. And that made this one different.

The murder occurred at a time when Bosque and its neighboring counties were in transition from the frontier to something resembling civilization. In 1870, only a few small settlements broke a huge expanse of open range and wilderness, but the county’s population more than doubled by 1880, from almost five thousand to more than eleven thousand. The Vaughan killing represented something new in an already violent world.

Big Bill Babb (right) with his right-hand man, Dave Ware (left). Courtesy Michael Barr.

At that time, such murder as this was very rare, early Coryell County settler and journalist J.B. Cranfill wrote of the Vaughan killing. It has never been unusual for men to be killed in Texas, but in those earlier years they were killed in combat with each other…Murder for purposes of robbery was almost wholly unknown in those early Texas days.

We might not remember J.T. Vaughan’s murder today if it hadn’t set